The hum grew louder.
It wasn't sound—it was presence. A vibration deep in the bones, a frequency that made Clyde's teeth ache and the air around him thicken like syrup.
He stumbled through the dark, hands skimming the walls. The layout of his apartment felt wrong. Familiar turns stretched too long, doors sat a little too low in their frames. His fingertips brushed the wall and recoiled—too smooth, like plastic pretending to be drywall.
He reached the kitchen and froze.
The clock on the microwave blinked: 88:88.
That's not a time.
Then it sparked—once—and the screen melted into itself, hissing like a dying hard drive. The scent of burning circuits stung his nostrils.
He pivoted, breath ragged, and made for the front door.
It was gone.
Where the entrance used to be—just wall. Seamless. No handle. No frame. As if the apartment had decided he wasn't leaving.
Panic scraped at his ribs.
He turned back to the window and yanked the blinds open again, desperately searching for something real.
And for a second—just a second—he thought maybe the city was back to normal.
Cars moved. People walked. Sounds returned: the dull thump of bass from somewhere below, a dog barking in the distance, a delivery drone humming across the skyline.
Clyde pressed his hand to the glass, relief creeping in—
And stopped.
The air.
It was too still. No movement through the cracked window. No breeze. No pressure shift. Just the illusion of sound, playing like a track on repeat. He focused, listened.
The same dog barked.
Same rhythm.
Same pitch.
Exactly every six seconds.
He counted. One… two… three…
Woof.
The same drone passed again. Same trajectory.
Same time stamp on its side: UNIT-73D | 13:17:42.
Every loop, identical.
Like a screensaver.
Then—faint, behind him—another voice. Not the hum. Not the puppet-Clyde.
This one was… female.
Soft. Sharp. Like it was cutting its way through static to reach him.
"You're corrupting the environment."
He turned fast—nothing there.
"Who said that?" he barked. "Where are you?"
Silence.
Then the lights flared on.
For a split second, everything looked… normal. His apartment exactly as he remembered it. Lived in. Dust on the shelves. Pizza box on the counter. Morning light spilling through real curtains.
Clyde blinked.
Then the walls melted.
Like a program crashing mid-render, his surroundings dissolved into shifting cubes of data, collapsing, rebuilding, warping—pixels twitching like insects. His floor vanished beneath his feet.
And he fell.
No wind. No up. No down.
Just velocity.
Around him, fragments of code and memory spun like shrapnel.
A woman laughing.
The sound of a gunshot.
The click of a keyboard.
A child screaming.
Then—impact.
He slammed into a new floor. Hard. Rolled over, groaning. Eyes struggling to adjust.
White walls.
Fluorescent lights.
No windows.
No exit.
A sterile room, humming with power.
A single chair in the center.
A console blinking on the wall.
And words, printed in red across the floor:
"SUBJECT A-01: ESCALATION PROTOCOL INITIATED"
Clyde coughed. Sat up.
"Good," he muttered, wiping blood from his mouth. "Let's escalate."